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Female directors will have a palpable presence at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, with women directors at the helm of 26 of 114 feature films and nearly a third of the short-films in the program. Rachel Boynton's documentary "Big Men" and Haifaa Al-Mansour's feature film "Wadjda" are among this year’s entries.

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Men outnumber women in family-rated films 3 to 1, but Academy Award-winning actor Geena Davis asserts Hollywood could help even up the gender ratio by simply making crowd scenes half women and half men and by going through scripts and changing some male character roles to females. By carrying out these two simple steps: "You have just quickly and easily boosted the female presence in your project without changing a line of dialogue," Davis writes.

Saudi filmmaker Haifaa al Mansour’s film "Wadjda" sparked discussions on women's rights at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Al Mansour’s movie is the first feature film made entirely in her native Saudi Arabia and the first film made in the country that has been directed by a Saudi woman.

Children can learn how to code in the Java programming language with CodeSpells, an experimental video game developed at the University of California, San Diego. Magic spells in the game are produced only by writing Java code. The game was tested on a group of 40 tween girls.

The time for real gender equality is now, Academy Award-winning actor Geena Davis argued during her keynote address at the National School Boards Association in San Diego. "The invisibility, hyper-sexualization, and dis-empowerment of women and girls in the media cry out for change," said Davis, who leads the California Commission on the Status of Women.

Saudi director Haifaa al-Mansour has done what no Saudi female before her with the successful completion of the feature film “Wadjda,” which recently showed at the Venice Film Festival. The film will be available only through DVDs or television as cinemas are officially banned in Saudi Arabia.